Abstract:
The new media have brought with them new forms of engagement with history. Jáchym Topol’s most recent novel, which plays with a grotesque war of memorial strategies in the Czech Republic and Belarus, reacts to this challenge with intermedial references, including structural imitation and a computer game. This article describes the textual means of creating an immersive experience that include literary modelling of the narrative strategies on the first-person shooter computer games. The article shows how a critical commentary on current practices of engaging with history, from commercialisation through banalisation and political reinterpretation, is transformed into the action of the novel, and how this memorythriller uses its borrowings from the genre of computer games to fulfil its own mission—the revitalisation of history via immersion in a fictional world, full of both hot and cold sites of memory.
Références (1) :
Alvarez, Julian et al. (2006). ‘Morphological Study of the Video Games’ in Proceedings of the 3rd Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment, Vol. 207, Sydney: Murdoch University, 36-43.